Like I Always Do
by HiddenCamellia
Summary: One love. Parallel lives. Across Time - Universe - Fate. LeviMika AU
1. Like I Always Do

**[AU] Credits/Disclaimers: Inspired by this Tumblr post. Only the story is mine, everything else belongs to their respective creators. Accompanying image from Google.**

I can recognise your voice in the midst of the cacophony of the World, I can read your eyes in the mirage of the Universe and I can follow you across Time. And yet, every time we meet, I must say goodbye to you before I am allowed to sculpt a promise out of my ill-fated hopes.

The first time, I hear you, I am blind. I can only hear you. You are the rough, rasping foul mouth who cares for the residents of the orphanage but vehemently opposes to make a show of it. You are far older than me. Thirty full years to my meager nine, but I think I fall in love with you. I cannot see, but I can hear you – your scoldings become my mantra. I have known only black and I have learnt to despise it. But when you tell me that my black hair is beautiful, 'black' has a meaning of love to it.

I only live for another four years and I die happy because I have had everything, I feel.

The next time, I see you. You are a punk. Leather jackets, stupid hair, riding a motor bike and annoying everyone. You survive, I am quite certain, on cigarettes and disgusting coffee. The first time we meet, I glare and curse at you while you dare to spill coffee on my fresh-pressed suit and instead of apologising, you smirk. I am late for work and I do not have time for your nonsense. I never hear you. My painted lips and arched brows are far above you. We see each other often after that and you always smirk at me while I glower at your impudence. The next valentine you have the audacity to leave a single red rose at my door while I watch from behind the curtains.

You die the following day riding that two-wheeled death-trap of yours. I keep the rose pressed close to my heart for the rest of my life.

The next time, I am fond of you from a very young age. You start off rough and grow up into a rougher individual, while I retain softness that feels somewhat unfamiliar. We are neighbours and we play together everyday. You are a little older than I am and quite bossy. You call me "defiant" and I don't understand the meaning of the word, so I deny that. You laugh and we traipse off to play at the park. I have a terrible attraction to half-baked schemes. You, aware of imminent failure, go along with my play. When I am grounded, you sneak me out for fun and games. You are my best friend and I am the maid of honour to your fiancée. She eventually cheats on you and you realise that what you thought was love, was in reality, a mistake. I am there through your messy divorce and depression. You wish me the best at my wedding. I marry and become more and more unhappy.

Four years later, we both jump off that cliff. You die and I survive, paralysed at the hospital with an year of suffering as reward. The only thing I can do is shed tears down my unfamiliar soft skin that no one bothers to wipe.

When I meet you again, you are royalty. Rotten, but royalty, nonetheless. You could not care less about that. You sleep with every young maid working at your palace and I am no exception. Other than the fact that I have been in love with you somehow. I hear you, I see you but I never talk to you. You never talk to me for I am not worth your time. You don't even know my name. But I do not fail to notice that I am the one you draw into the bedroom when you are at your most vulnerable and I am the only one who is not allowed to leave the room immediately after the deed is done. I fancy myself a special person – special to you. One of those nights, you are particularly enraged over something and as we lay on the bed with your head in the crook of my neck, you ask me if I would sacrifice my life for you. Your face does not betray any emotion and I am afraid that this is over. Dark eyes clashing with your steel grey ones, I reply decisively and take an oath to be by your side. You look at me with an emotion I can't name. You never call another woman to your chambers after that, except me.

I die of disease and you hold my hand through my final moments, kissing me, as I ask you to not contract anything and bless you with all I have. You kiss me again in reply as I silently slip away.

The time after that, we are arch enemies. I am a professional and excel at my job. I am an assassin and you are the law chasing me – hunting me – trying to take my livelihood away, and perhaps, my life too. I am always a step ahead of you, always a bit smarter, always a bit cleverer. You curse away at your subordinates and secretly consume all manners of illegal drugs because I am driving you insane. I know this. I know more. I know a lot. And I relish the fact that I am causing you this sweet, palpable torture that we both lust for. I like feeling this way about you and I love what you feel for me. You never see me for I am a ghost, but I have seen, heard and on one daredevil occasion, conversed with you in all your stressed, five-feet-two, overworked demeanour glory. You tempt me and I tempt you.

You catch up with me. Really intimately. With my knife through my stomach as you struggle to win the death match. I know I am not going to survive and somehow, I feel like I am home. Like this is absolutely acceptable. Like I want to be connected to you. And I know that you are done with this job too as you stare into my eyes for the very first and only time, and say things worth a million lifetimes, but I can only grasp a moment of them before being spirited away into oblivion.

When we meet again, we consume each other in emotions. I am a college freshman and you are the young professor who decidedly fails at hiding the fact that he is attracted to me. You wait for me to graduate and make major life decisions. I become a doctor and you are proud of me. Then, you ask for my hand and I warble a 'yes' with hot tears streaming down my face that you cup and kiss. I love you. You don't say it, but I know you love me too.

On our wedding day, I get a call from the hospital asking for my immediate presence even though I am off duty. The city is in chaos, I realise I have to leave. I call and leave a voicemail for you and rush to the hospital – wedding regalia donned, hair and make-up perfect. When I reach, I am only given the DOA list with your name on it. I am a widow before my wedding. And that day, I think I die more than you.

There must be lifetimes, in which I never meet you, lifetimes in which we just barely meet, lifetimes in which we barely miss. The idea of not being in your time scares me. Everytime we meet, I somehow know you and yet don't. I sometimes think, it's the dream of you that I am in love with. And yet, I long for the lifetime where I am yours and you are mine. Where, you are my happiness and I am your everything. And for that, if I have to chase you across universes, then I will. For you see, I am made of the same element as you. We are never meant to be apart. Your eyes say you know that – perhaps, you are waiting for me to realise?

Just wait, I will find you. Like I always do.


	2. You Always Do

**Pairing: Mikasa Ackerman x Levi [AU]: QUIDAM – RivaMikaWeek (Dec 25, '14 – Jan 1, '15)**

**Credits/Disclaimers: Only the story is mine, everything else belongs to their respective creators. Accompanying fic to Like I Always Do [From Levi's point of view].**

I have been told in every Universe of existence that people like me are meant to be alone, because I cannot keep. I cannot keep faith. I cannot keep friendship. I cannot keep love. I cannot keep. Yet, I feel nostalgic for memories that I have never had. I blame that on you. You see, in each lifetime when I am reminded of the inevitability of my solitary existence, in every one of those lifetimes and many others I have seen you, heard you, felt you and breathed you in – imbibing your existence into mine. How, then, can I accept and believe the loneliness of my existence?

It is true that our lives leave us forlorn every time we meet. Fate seems to have a way with us. But every time, I end up alone, I just know that I messed up somewhere.

When we meet at the orphanage, you are blind and young. The sad, solitary soul that no one seems to want to include in anything. Naturally, my harshness should deepen that lonely existence - I think, but you come to me. Hold my rough, calloused hands with your tiny ones. It does not matter to you that I cannot provide the softness you need, but make a small home in my heart. The little girl at the shelter for the unwanted becomes the life of my day-to-day trudging along. There isn't a lot that I can claim for living, but you change that. I love your black hair and when I tell you that, you seem happy. The kind of happy that I cannot explain, you cannot contain – the kind that still haunts me.

When you die, I feel the jagged edges of loneliness – of being alone in a world where nothing belongs to us anyway. I work at that orphanage for the rest of my life, hoping with a large dose of silliness, that you will show up again. What had started as a small part-time venture becomes my life because you gave it to me. I realise a little too late the importance of this meeting.

The next time we meet, I almost want to laugh out loud at our differences. From the young girl who walked into people, you have transformed into the sternest looking, impossibly immaculate executive of some hot-shot company, that I have ever laid my eyes upon. Really? You could not have been the young thing that was so easy to charm. For you see, your first glare at my leather encased body imprints upon me the starkness of our diversity. I lose all hope for a while, until we keep running into each other everywhere. Suddenly, I realise that we are meant to be. That longing takes a stronghold in my heart and I am done with missing my opportunities.

On Valentine's Day, I muster up my courage to send you the slightest hint of my affections. But Fate interferes and that one rose is all I can give you instead of the countless moments of love that I had always planned. My heart breaks to see you living around my memory for I know that you know. You know what we are.

My wish of seeing you young comes true the next time we are around each other. You are my neighbour. I wonder if anything else in the Universe could have been more straightforward than this to set us straight on our paths to each other and if anything else in the Universe could have been worse in the department of fatuity that even in this lifetime – the one we had in the palms of our hands, we miss each other so badly.

While I fall deeper and deeper in love with you as we grow up, I sense that you don't think we can be together. I start to believe that too. How foolish or, how like you to string me along to play the same melody that you do. Against you, I never have a chance in any lifetime. We end up unhappy in our marriages and years later attempt to end our lives together – I wish we had the courage to fight for ourselves. You know, us against the world? For it seems, we are already against everything in Existence.

When I see you again, we have a status difference. Of all the things that could keep us apart, this seems to be the most trivial and yet, you abide by it. Therefore, I do too. And in my defiance of our situation and anger at how easily you disarm my so-called authority by merely existing, I act out. Even so, you are ready to accept the me that has become nothing but an empty and useless shell of depravity. You never disappoint. So when you leave me alone once more, I decide to follow you – royalty be damned.

We meet again. And this time, I truly do not see you but I know you exist. You are there. I can feel it in my blood and being. Or maybe it is the demanding detective work that has finally inundated me with insane thoughts. So, I turn to more insanity – but the chemicals at least take me to a higher level of attention and awareness. If you are here – playing with me, I will myself to sense you out. I realise too late that my work and the assassin I am trying to catch pour into my longing for you. When I do catch up with you, I do so fatally intimately. I have sensed you out and now you are all I am sensing as you close your eyes to eternal innocence. In that one split second I try to convey everything that I am feeling, that I have known and that I have not known to you – strangely enough, you seem content with this decision.

The drugs eventually take my life – which is fine, after you, there wasn't anything in this World for which I wanted to live.

We meet again and this time despite our relationship status – I vow to make us a little happier than we have been in the past. I realise the slightly large age difference, the fact that you are my student and that you have ambitions beyond the sky – but difficult or not, I have wasted enough time being shy. So, the moment you finish your studies, I ask you. I ask you to be mine and you say yes. This time, I think, this time we will live. We will tough it out together.

There is much that Fate has granted me and yet I cannot help but be hateful of it because, once again, you are taken away from me. A car accident should not be enough to disturb what I have with you. Nonetheless, we are separated again on the very day on which we were to married. With my last breathe I regret a failed life, but I promise to myself to come back for you. I have loved you too much to be afraid of a few curtains separating us for a few moments in the grandness of Life.

Is it more painful to wait or to make the other wait? I believe we both play both roles. We are just a tad too obtuse to reach out for what is ours. Albeit the torn lives, I feel we are getting closer. Can you sense it too? Your eyes say you do. We have come from co-existing to almost within each others' grasp and nothing will stop me from reaching you. From returning to you.

You are my home. I have been with you and watched you across lifetimes and I will continue to do so. I will follow you across Time, I will accompany you in every reflection of a life that we experience. My favourites are when we are in each other's World a little too intertwined for Fate to be comfortable – when we love passionately and consume each other – when we almost melt into one. Seems like you know how to make the most of those lives too. So for now, my love, the incarnations of memories will suffice. You are a fighter and I can see the flames burning in your heart. Surrender is not in your nature and hopelessness isn't in mine. So, I will wait till you find me. Find me. You always do.

**A/N: An accompanying side from Levi's POV. I felt like his voice needed to be heard too! :) This is also written as part of RivaMikaWeek - Cycle 4.**


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